In recent years, the capacities of storage equipment designed to be connected to information processing equipment such as server equipment are becoming increasingly larger year after year. The storage capacity of storage equipment is increased, for example, by increasing the number of magnetic disk units included in the storage equipment. The numbers of magnetic disk units in storage equipment may be as many as a thousand to several thousands.
When an OS (Operating System) program on server equipment needs to be restarted for some reason, it takes long time to reboot the server equipment that has a huge number of magnetic disk units. The reason is that the OS program on the server equipment needs to perform processing for making all of the magnetic disk units connected to the server equipment available during the rebooting and the time required for the processing is proportional to the number of the magnetic disk units. This prolongs non-operation time of the server equipment. There has been a growing demand for minimizing such non-operation time of the server equipment.
For example, a technique described in Japanese Laid-open Patent Publication No. 2001-147888 registers beforehand the logical unit numbers of magnetic disk units that are needed for the OS program to boot in boot information. The technique allows the system to identify the magnetic disk units registered in the boot information to avoid trying to access magnetic disk units that do not exists or respond. Note that the logical unit numbers are identification numbers assigned to virtual disk units into which the magnetic disk units of storage equipment are divided or combined.
A technique described in Japanese Translation of PCT International Application Publication No. 2003-532193 provides a list that stores information indicating whether or not server equipment is to be connected with magnetic disk units attached to the server equipment during start-up of an OS program on the server equipment. The technique dynamically modifies descriptions on the list to mask access to magnetic disk units when connecting the server equipment to magnetic disk units attached to the server equipment.
A technique described in Japanese Laid-open Patent Publication No. 2009-193301 saves information stored in a main memory at the completion of initialization of an OS program on server equipment. The technique loads the saved main memory information into the main memory again during rebooting of the server equipment. On the basis of the operation, the technique omits initialization processing on magnetic disk units that would be performed by the OS program on the server equipment.
A technique described in Japanese Laid-open Patent Publication No. 2005-284491 stores information about devices including magnetic disk units that is obtained during first initialization performed by a BIOS (Basic Input Output System) prior to OS program initialization. The technique uses the information about the devices stored during the first initialization for second initialization for start-up of the OS program. On the basis of the operation, the technique omits a process for setting device control information during the second initialization for start-up of the OS program.